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How & Why to Notify Credit Cards When You Travel Abroad

July 27, 2016
by
Million Mile Secrets Million Mile Secrets

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Million Mile SecretsMillion Mile Secrets Team

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To Avoid Problems, Notify Your Credit Card Issuer Before You Travel. Certain Cards Will Even Let You Set Travel Alerts Online!

I’ll explain why this is important. And show you the different ways to set travel alerts!

Set Travel Alerts for Your Credit Cards When Traveling Abroad

Setting travel notifications is important because credit card issuers will often block a card if they think there’s suspicious activity. And you don’t want the headache of having a charge declined while on vacation!

Also, don’t forget to use a card that does not charge foreign transaction fees when traveling outside the US. Because fees usually negate the value of miles & points you’re earning!

My favorite no foreign transaction fee card is the Chase Sapphire Preferred which earns 2X points for travel (airfare, hotel, car rental, etc) and dining. Because that’s what vacation is for, right? To explore and eat good food! 🙂

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Editorial Note: We're the Million Mile Secrets team. And we're proud of our content, opinions and analysis, and of our reader's comments. These haven’t been reviewed, approved or endorsed by any of the airlines, hotels, or credit card issuers which we often write about. And that’s just how we like it! :)

6comments

Just did this tonight for a trip starting tomorrow to Germany. FYI, the screenshots for Chase’s site are out-of-date; they’ve updated their site a lot lately. Now it’s found under the “Things you can do” menu, by first selecting “Update settings…” and then from the expanded list that appears after clicking that by selecting “Travel Notification”. The form that comes up next can be picky about characters you type in, so just name the country and leave it at that. If it doesn’t like what you’ve typed, it might error out saying “It looks like that part of our site isn’t working right now”, but that’s not exactly true…it just choked on parsing your input. A list of country names with just commas should work. I only needed one this time. Hope this update is helpful!

In the past I’ve always done this by calling the card company, but this will be much faster! Thanks.

Incidentally, during a recent trip to Mexico, I used some cards without informing the card companies at all and everything worked fine (and I’d not been to Mexico prior to that for several years, so it wasn’t a case of them knowing my travel habits).

Editorial Note: We're the Million Mile Secrets team. And we're proud of our content, opinions and analysis, and of our reader's comments. These haven’t been reviewed, approved or endorsed by any of the airlines, hotels, or credit card issuers which we often write about. And that’s just how we like it! :)